Gareth Huws sat down with Ports, Past and Present and shared the story of a fascinating daily ritual that carried on for nearly a century: the conveyance of a single watch travelling back and forth between Dublin and London via Holyhead.

The first scheduled steam packet service between West Wales and Ireland can be traced to back the year 1824. It was in that year that the Post Office replaced its sailing packets on the Milford Haven to Waterford run with steamships. The…

The London North Western Railway Company (LNWR) maintained their Holyhead to Dublin express service by switching the two Greenore ships to the Dublin service. An older ship was on standby. The potential of U-boats to destroy shipping had hardly…

After the introduction of the uniform penny post in the United Kingdom in 1840, postal volumes grew rapidly and were an increasingly important part of goods traffic between Great Britain and Ireland. In 1849, the Post Office invited tenders for a…